Ebook: Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial

Explores Mansfield’s identity as a (post)colonial writer in relation to her foremost reputation as a European modernist

In seeking new possibilities for alignments with, and resolutions to, the contradictory agendas implied by the terms ‘(post)colonial’ and ‘modernist’, the essays in this volume address the clashing perspectives between Mansfield’s life in Europe, where her troubled self-designation as the ‘little colonial’ became a fertile source of her distinctive brand of literary modernism, and her ongoing, complex relationship with her New Zealand homeland. The contributors investigate Mansfield’s (post)colonial modernism in the context both of New Zealand settler-colonial fiction and of her European literary inheritance. Affinities with writers such as Edith Wharton and Robert Louis Stevenson reveal that ‘home’ can be a diasporic place, combining alienation with belonging. The volume also registers initial responses to the widened scope for Mansfield scholarship launched by the first two volumes of the new Edinburgh Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield.

The volume includes:

• Previously unpublished poetry and fiction
• Reports of current research findings on Katherine Mansfield
• An introduction by Janet Wilson, Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, University of Northampton
• Reviews of recent publications on Mansfield and her contemporaries